In many typical mounting arrangements, LEDs are mounted in a mounting assembly or mount which is then soldered to a printed circuit board using reflow surface mount techniques. In such arrangements, to remove and replace a defective or burned out LED, or to change out one LED for another, it is necessary to heat the solder holding the original LED mount in place to its melting point and then to remove the original LED mount, clean the board, and then to resolder a replacement LED mount in its place. Alternatively, a whole new replacement board may be utilized to avoid the step of replacing the LED completely. Both of these approaches have their drawbacks with respect to ease of replacement, cost or the like,
In an alternative approach, an LED has been mounted in a threaded sleeve which fits in a standard incandescent light bulb socket. While such an arrangement has the benefit of being easy to replace in a manner intuitively obvious to the average consumer, it suffers from having a relatively bulky form factor that may prevent optimal design of a lighting fixture to take advantage of the small size of the LED light source. It also has a relatively high cost.
Additionally, LED-based fixtures with multiple LEDs are being developed and are becoming more prevalent. These fixtures do not typically have a sufficiently easy and cost effective mechanism for replacing individual LEDs.